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Charlie Hebdo

Jan 11, 2015 / terry / 3 comments

The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is left-wing and strongly anti-religious. In 2006, it reprinted the controversial Muhammad cartoons from Denmark’s Jyllends Posten. The cover of that issue of Charlie Hebdo (left) had shown the prophet “overwhelmed by fundamentalists” bewailing that “it is hard to be loved by jerks.” The magazine was unsuccessfully sued by several Islamic organizations for hate crimes. Since then, and despite the firebombing of its offices in 2011, the magazine has continued its irreverence.

On January 7, 2015, three masked gunmen killed twelve people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, including the editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb) and the senior cartoonist Jean Cabut (Cabu). The shooting was clearly in retaliation for the magazine’s blasphemy. The gunmen were heard to shout Allahu Akbar (“God is great”) and “Vous allez payer, car vous avez insulté le Prophète” – “You will pay for you have insulted the Prophet.” (Selow, 2015).

Category: Art, Politics, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Blasphemy, Chevalier de la Barre, Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, James Aikenhead

Death Speaks

Jan 8, 2015 / terry / No comments

W. Somerset Maugham, silverpoint by Bernard Perlin, 1946

Somerset Maugham’s last play Sheppey (1933/1997) tells the story of a barber Joseph Miller, who was nicknamed Sheppey after his birthplace in Kent. Sheppey wins one of the Irish Sweepstakes prizes and decides to use the money to help the poor. He is quickly considered crazy. His doctor states:

It’s quite obvious that a sane man is not going to give all his money away to the poor. A sane man takes money away from the poor … The normal man is selfish, grasping, destructive, vain and sensual. What is generally termed morality is forced upon him by the herd, and the obligation that he is under to repress his natural instincts is undoubtedly the cause of many of the disorders of the mind.

The idea of the play hearkens back to one of Maugham’s early short stories, A Bad Example, published in 1899. Neither the story nor the play were very successful. However, one brief speech from the play has become one of the most renowned texts of 20^th Century literature.

At the end of the play, Sheppey is visited by Death in female form. She will take him away before he is certified insane. Sheppey wonders whether he should have fulfilled one of his dreams and gone to a cottage on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. Perhaps Death would not have thought of looking for him there. Death tells him it would not have mattered.

There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

Category: Film, Literature, Religion / Tags: Appointment in Samarra, Boris Karloff, Death, Ingmar Bergman, John O'Hara, Sheppey, The Seventh Seal, W. Somerset Maugham

Winter Light

Dec 29, 2014 / terry / No comments

The coming of the winter twilight clarifies the mind. With the snow the light becomes more intense, the dark more evident, and the remaining colors more obvious. The heightened contrast forces us to think.

The 1871 painting Winter Twilight from Olana is by Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). He was a successful member of the Hudson River School, and at the time of the painting lived on the Olana estate overlooking the river. This small painting (10 by 13 inches) is a vivid representation of winter.

This posting considers the light of winter through four different poems. Read more

Category: Art, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Emily Dickinson, Frederic Church, Myra Schneider, Thomas Hardy, Wallace Stevens

Fakes

Dec 10, 2014 / terry / No comments

The human mind creates pictures, tells stories, and invents explanations. Sometimes these activities are closely linked to a real world, sometimes they rise freely from the imagination. Nevertheless they are usually attuned in some way to truth. Science creates testable hypotheses for what might happen. Art is much less closely tied to the real world but still helps us to understand it.

For various reasons human beings also create false things. The intention is to deceive. The motives are various. Sometimes the fraudster is looking for personal gain. Sometimes she wishes to make others look like fools. Sometimes he just does it because it is possible. This post considers three famous fakes.

Category: Art, History, Literature, Painting / Tags: Ern Malley, Han van Meegeren, Orson Welles, Piltdown Man

Cosmos Mariner

Nov 24, 2014 / terry / No comments

The poet Conrad Aiken was born in 1889 in Savannah, Georgia. When Aiken was 11 years old, his father, a respected surgeon, shot his wife and then committed suicide. Trying to distance himself from the experience in the third person, Conrad later recounted his discovery of the bodies:

[A]fter the desultory early morning quarrel, came the half stifled scream, and then the sound of his father’s voice counting three, and the two loud pistol-shots; and he had tiptoed into the dark room, where the two bodies lay motionless and apart, and, finding them dead, found himself possessed of them forever. (Aiken, 1952, p 302).

Aiken was taken into the care of his aunt, Jane Delano Kempton, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and later lived with an uncle, William Tillinghast, a college librarian at Harvard. After graduating from Middlesex Preparatory School in Concord, Aiken was admitted to Harvard University in 1907, where he became a friend of T. S. Eliot.

After leaving Harvard in 1912, Aiken decided to devote his life to poetry. Though much more prolific than Eliot, Aiken never achieved his colleague’s popularity. Many of Aiken’s poems are long and discursive. They might perhaps have benefited from an editor like Ezra Pound, who was so effective in separating out the gold in Eliot’s verse (Eliot, 1922/1971). Aiken published more than 30 volumes of poetry, several novels, many short stories and two autobiographical memoirs. Despite receiving the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and serving as the Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress, Aiken became “one of the country’s best-known and least-read poets and men of letters” (Butscher, 1988, p xvii).

Category: History, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion / Tags: Conrad Aiken, Li Po

Destroy the Old!

Oct 6, 2014 / terry / One comment

China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (无产阶级文化大革命 pinyin: Wúchǎnjiējí Wénhuà Dàgémìng) was one of the most terrifying periods in modern Chinese history. The revolution turned upon itself in a fury of denunciation and violence. The goal was to root out those who opposed the revolution. The result was a rampage of destruction. Everything old was to be done away with to make way for the new. Those associated with the old culture were punished or executed. The poster on the right (from Wikipedia) shows the Red Guard in action against symbols of religion, capitalism and culture. The slogan reads “Destroy the old world! Establish the new!” (打破旧世界 dǎ pò jiù shì jiè 创立新世界 chuàng lì xīn shì jiè ). The Cultural Revolution began in 1966, and did not really end until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Much of the old was destroyed; nothing new was created.

Category: Art, History, Literature, Poetry, Politics, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong

Newcomb’s Problem

Sep 23, 2014 / terry / No comments

The concepts of determinism and freedom are nicely illustrated in a philosophical problem originally invented by William Newcomb, a California physicist. The philosopher Robert Nozick published an analysis of the problem in 1969, and since then it has been widely discussed (Nozick, 1969; Gardner, 1973, 1974, 2001; Drescher, 2005, Chapters 5 and 6; Mark in Malaysia, 2009, summarizes the issues on his webpage).

The basic problem is to decide how to act in the following situation. There are two boxes. The first contains $1000. You can see inside this box: the money is certainly there. The second contains either $1,000,000 or nothing. You cannot see inside this box. You can choose (i) to take both boxes or (ii) to refuse the first box and just take the second. A superior being predicts how you will choose and, before you do so, places in the second box either $1,000,000 if it predicts that you will refuse the first box, or nothing if it predicts that you will take both. The choice must be deliberate: it cannot be made on the basis of some random event such as a coin toss. How do you choose – one box or two?

Category: Philosophy, Poetry, Religion / Tags: Determinism, Free Will, Robert Nozick, William Newcomb

Here I stand

Sep 14, 2014 / terry / One comment

The Diet of Worms was an assembly of the lords of the Holy Roman Empire called together by Emperor Charles V in 1521. One of the duties of the Diet was to consider whether the writings of Martin Luther were heretical. The Diet marked the point-of-no-return for the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s ringing statement “Here I stand” reclaimed the spiritual freedom of the individual. Henceforth each person could choose to interpret scripture and to commune with God without the necessary intervention of the church. However, Luther’s actual concept of freedom was far more complicated than this.

Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk who studied, taught and preached at the University of Wittenberg in Saxony, one of the states of the Holy Roman Empire. The engraving on the right by Lucas Cranach the Elder shows Luther in his monk’s attire. Cranach was the court painter for the Elector of Saxony. He knew Luther well and made several portraits of him. This engraving was used as a frontispiece for several of Luther’s early books. The Latin beneath the portrait states that Luther’s depiction of his thinking was eternal but Cranach’s portrait of his features only transient. At the bottom is a device used by Cranach as his signature – a winged serpent with a crown upon his head and a ruby ring in his mouth.

Category: Art, History, Philosophy, Religion / Tags: Free Will, Lucas Cranach, Martin Luther, Predestination, Reformation

States of Surveillance

Aug 16, 2014 / terry / No comments

In June of 2013, TV screens were filled with the image of an articulate young man in a hotel room in Hong Kong. He was telling us that the US government was monitoring what we did on the phone and on the internet. The National Security Agency (NSA), he said (transcript),

targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient, and most valuable way to achieve these ends.

Category: History, Literature, Politics / Tags: Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Nineteen Eighty Four, Panopticon

Sub Regno Cynarae

Aug 5, 2014 / terry / 2 comments

Sketch of Ernest Dowson by William Rothentstein in early 1890s

Sketch of Ernest Dowson by William Rothenstein in early 1890s

Ernest Dowson was born in 1867 into a prosperous family in London. His father owned a dock, but had more interest in literature than in business. Ernest spent two and a half years at Oxford, but he did not take a degree, leaving in 1888. The dock fell into debt, and the family became poor. His father took his own life in 1894, his mother following suit a few months later. Ernest Dowson became a homeless, alcoholic poet. He consorted with prostitutes. His most famous poem recalls the shadow of an earlier love:

Category: Art, History, Poetry, Religion / Tags: Ernest Dowson, Horace, Propertius, Walter Pater

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